I hope this doesn't lead to surgeons turning down near-hopeless cases out of fear that patients requiring less complicated versions of the same procedure will opt for an experienced surgeon whose record has not been "artificially" blemished by taking on desperate cases with low chances of success.
...will opt for an INexperienced...
My fear exactly, as well as the knowledge that if any statistic is published, one can rest assured that it will indeed be twisted and misinterpreted by the press.
A set of statistics such as this is utterly meaningless on it's own without context, and the mammoth amount of data required to provide context is beyond the scope of most media outlets to provide and is also beyond the attention span of most people to convey accurately.
This is a very sad day for the people of Scotland and for the practice and science of medicine. A damaging precedent has now been set, and the question will now be "why doesn't OUR country publish such statistics?"
We've seen somewhat similar things happen in other arenas of human endeavor; law enforcement comes to mind. I recall 'news' stories of police shootings, where the press brings up previous shooting(s) by the same officer, with the obvious attempt being to smear the officer as a 'rogue cop with an itchy trigger finger' while not considering the possibility that this may instead be a GREAT cop who is working in a high-crime area and so is more prone to encounter violent felons.